Moving to Tizen will bring battery life improvements for the Galaxy Gear

Samsung launched its first generation Galaxy Gear smartwatch back in September 2013. The $299 smartwatch launched with a heavily customized version of Android and wasn’t exactly well received by customers.

SamMobile revealed that Samsung has released a Tizen 2.2.0 update for the original Galaxy Gear. The operating system overhaul won’t bring any drastic changes to the user interface, but it does bring the Galaxy Gear to [software] feature parity with the Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo (with the exception of the heart rate monitoring capabilities). Users will also benefit from a standalone music player and increased battery life.

You should be warned, however, that since this is a complete operating system overhaul, ALL of your existing data WILL be erased after performing the update. In addition, some of your third-party apps may not be compatible with Tizen.

Tizen is a compelling platform. It doesn't have all the apps that Google or Apple do but if you are looking to get away from either of the two for various reasons it may be a good option. May be because there isn't much of Tizen to speak of yet. I'm in a camp where I have a pile of iOS and android devices and they are all POS'es in their own way and I'm ready for a new player with something good. Android is a dog and ios is tied to Apple products we need more options.

Whether Tizen is a good platform or not is probably almost irrelevant. What is relevant now is apps. Just as Jason Mick changed from using the Microsoft OS to Android, the fact is hardly any Smartphone OS will last unless it has apps like WeChat.

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